By Johan Olausson
First question first, what is content marketing really?
Joe Pulizzi, founder of the US-based Content Marketing Institute has come up with a definition that we feel sums this one up pretty well: “Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
In other words, whereas traditional marketing is most often concerned with touting the virtues of products and services or the brand, content marketing is about giving customers and other key stakeholders content that is interesting, engaging and of value to them. Content can be both written or video, and provided via online, mobile and printed channels. Companies and brands that use content marketing and storytelling as a key part of their branding and communications strategies include Coca-Cola, General Electric, Apple and AkzoNobel. In fact, most successful companies within both B2C and B2B today are engaged with content marketing, and if you’re a B2B company it’s a must.
In a B2B context, content should both have a strong message and have the potential to add value to the business, and that means knowledge-based information packaged in a way that’s relevant and engaging. Giving away free knowledge is an investment that often gives a return of investment far greater than, for instance, advertising. In a B2C context, content marketing can be merely entertaining, but ideally it should also add some form of value, and deliver a solid message.
Ok, but why should we do it?
In other words, you’re asking, why is this better than traditional marketing? Well, instead of demanding people’s attention and time simply to feed them a message saying that you’re the best or that your products are the best, what you’re doing with content marketing is giving them something they value and find useful without demanding anything in return. Modern-day B2C and B2B buyers alike have developed powerful mechanisms and habits to filter out traditional marketing, whether it’s popup blockers on the laptop, DVRs to skip through TV ads, or just having their fingers hard wired into flipping through pages filled with ads in a printed magazine or on a tablet. So each year you get less ROI on your ad spending, regardless of whether you’re in B2C or in B2B, regardless what line of business you’re in, and regardless of whether you spend your dollars online, on print, social media or TV.
But people can’t focus long enough, right?
Some say that people today don’t have the attention span required for good storytelling. As Nicholas Carr wrote as early as 2008, in a famous and often quoted article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, people today only read short snippets of texts or can’t be bothered to watch anything longer than a “Vine”. If this is the case, should you really put your marketing budget into content marketing and storytelling? The short answer is – you’re still reading this, aren’t you?
The long answer is that storytelling, even in very long formats – or the “long read” as it’s called – is getting bigger as we speak. Publications such as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post, which pioneered short reads, are now carrying an increasing amount of longer content and storytelling. Facebook increased the number of characters you can use for your status updates from to 420 from 160 in 2009, and since 2011 it has been possible to update your status to the length of a novelette, with a whopping 60,000 characters at your disposal. Chances are you’ve seen and read some very long updates, even on your phone. But to really make the point, consider this: Twitter, synonymous with short bursts of texts, is considering increasing their character limit from 140 to 10,000 for tweets.
OK, this is starting to make sense now, but how do we do it?
At Bamboo, we’ve been doing content marketing for our clients ever since we started in 1996, with a focus on B2B. We like to think that we know what we’re doing, so here are a few tips we consider essential. As with most of our clients, we’ll assume that you have an overall brand strategy and communications plan in place but want to do even better.
When developing your content marketing strategy, you need to start by identifying your goals. What results would you like to see from your investment in terms of content marketing? Do you want to build brand awareness? Do you want to increase your customer reach in a specific segment, or in a specific geographical market? Do you want to position yourself in a special way to your competitors? This will all impact what you do next.
The next step is to create and establish a mission statement based on your goals. What’s the target audience? What information do they want/need and how and why do they want it? How will you give them this information? What outcome should the content lead to for your target audience?
By answering these questions, you will get a better understanding of what kind of content you should develop and for what audience. You will know when and in what countries you should distribute your content, and to which customer segments. You will start to get a feeling for what kind of channels you should use and how, whether you should localise content for different markets, and so on. By looking at desired outcomes, you will start understanding what key performance indicators (KPIs) make the best sense.
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